How To Find The Cheapest Flights To Anywhere

Itching to just grab your suitcase and fly somewhere? Don’t really care where as long as it’s cheap and gets you away from wherever you are now?

We’ve scored some fantastic deals using airfare search engines that let you type in your departure city (or country) and search for cheap flights to virtually any destination in the world. This is perfect if you’re searching for flights without a destination in mind.

Using these hacks, we found cheap one way flights from Cancun, Mexico to Madrid, Spain for $160 USD all in. We also just booked a one way flight from Istanbul, Turkey to Toronto, Canada for just $288 including taxes and fees. That’s less than your average local flight within Canada. These tips will work to find the cheapest flights from NYC to anywhere, or really from any city or country!

How to find the cheapest flights to anywhere

Sound interesting? In this post, we:

Tell you how we find cheap flights to anywhere (and no, none of these companies paid us to write this post).

Review the major flight search engines that allow you to search from a departure city (or country) without including any specific destination. You can use this feature to search cheap flights by date not destination.

Skyscanner

Let’s start with what we think is the best search engine of the bunch for finding cheap flights anywhere: Skyscanner. To find cheap flights to everywhere from your destination, just leave the To field blank in your Skyscanner search (or type Everywhere). This works really well to find last minute cheap flights to anywhere as well!

Skyscanner lets you see a month of fares at a time, which can save you a bundle if your dates are flexible. It will also let you see the cheapest month.

To see flights for a whole month, or choose the cheapest month, just click in the Depart box.

Skyscanner Explore also lets you type in a country name in the From box to find cheap airfares from all cities in the country.

Skyscanner map search. This is one of our favorite features on Skyscanner, and it’s a great helping in showing you how to find random cheap flights to anywhere. On the Skyscanner site (click here to search on Skyscanner), scroll down and click on the map to see an airfare map with prices and explore cheap flights.

Then just select your departure city or airport and date. You can only select one month at a time for fares, but this flight price map is a great way to see cheap flights to a random destination in the world.

Free Apps: We use the Skyscanner iPhone app a lot as well to find Skyscanner flights to anywhere. The app seems to have almost all of the features of the site, including the ability to search for flights to anywhere, and for a month at a time. It also features a cool interactive cheap flights map that lists prices to cities around the globe. The app is available for iPhone, iPad, on Google Play, and Amazon apps.

The prices listed on Skyscanner are based on previous flight search data. That means when you click the link to search prices, your new search prices may be different from the first prices you saw. When you actually go to book, prices may change as well.

What we don’t like: The prices you see first aren’t always the final price you pay, as they’re pulled from earlier searches by Skyscanner users.

Our take: The best of the bunch. Skyscanner is easy to use, we’ve found that the fares it comes up with are generally accurate, and it even comes as a well designed app. Love it. It also makes a great tool to quickly find cheap alternative routes to your destination, and find cheap flights without a destination in mind.

Kayak’s Explore tool lets you search for airfares for different seasons, like spring or winter, making it a great tool for long term planning.

Results show up in a map. You can drag and zoom, making it easy to see airfares to different regions, or even for the entire world at once.

Kayak Explore has some fun search filters that let you see only fights by weather, and by things to do (golf, gambling, and so on). You can even narrow down results by budget. It’s among the best cheap flight finder to anywhere, but it’s not perfect.

Note: The Kayak Explore flight map prices are based on flights found on Kayak in the last 48 hours. When you actually go to book, prices may be different.

Free Apps: Kayak has a free app for iPhone, iPad, and Android. You can use the Kayak Explore map feature by clicking Explore the world on the home screen.

What we don’t like: We’re not keen that the Explore tool only lists round trip fares, making it harder to plan trips with multiple legs. Another thing we don’t love is that Kayak Explore won’t let you see all flights from a specific country. Instead, you’re limited to searching from specific cities.

Our take. Very good. We love the map display of fares, and the fun search options, but don’t like that it only lists round trip fares (Kayak Explore one way doesn’t work), and that it won’t find cheapest flights any date from a specific country.

Google Flights

It’s fast, prices are accurate, but it just doesn’t offer enough functionality for searches to random cheap destinations. The major drawback is that you have to specify a departure date, and you can’t search for cheapest flights for an entire month or year.

It has an annoying feature I wish they’d correct; if you’re in the Explore map, and you happen to have a date in the Return box, you can’t delete it. Instead, you need to go back to the main Google Flights page, and re-enter your search without a return date to see one way flights.

What we like: It’s fast, and prices are among the most accurate of the bunch. There are about a million filters, which can be nice if you’re picky about price, number of stops, or flight duration and the like.

What we don’t like: You need to specify an exact departure date, which is annoying. You also can’t search for airfares from an entire country, which can be nice if your departure city is flexible.

Our take: Not bad. Not quite good enough to move away from Skyscanner as our first choice for finding the cheapest flights today to anywhere, but it’s getting closer.

Escape from MIT

There’s a relative newcomer to the flight search engine landscape called Escape at www.greatescape.co that’s worth a mention. It was developed by the MIT Senseable City Laboratory in Singapore.

It’s a great choice if you’re a visual person, since it displays flight prices on an interactive map. Escape searches searches both Kiwi and Skyscanner for prices.

You can search by your departure city to Anywhere in the world, and then see the prices displayed on a map. You can search by one way or round trip, or by fixed or flexible dates. You can also put in a trip duration from 1 to 31 days.

The flexible dates feature is pretty nice, since you can choose months at a time to search, or just a few days, whichever you prefer.

The main downside to Escape is that you need to put in a specific departure city, making your search a little less flexible.

I tried Escape out, comparing it to Google Flights, and found that in the three tests I ran, Google flights was able to find a cheaper flight. I also had trouble clicking through to get flight details.

Other search engines

We use Skyscanner, Kayak Explore and sometimes Google Flights almost exclusively to search for flights from a specific destination to anywhere.

That said, there are a few other flight search engines that do a similar job (though not nowhere near as well). We’ve included them here just for the sake of completeness.

Kiwi.com

Kiwi.com is an unfamiliar name to most. That said, it has a decent map-based search function, and we find it somewhat useful for an “I’ll go anywhere flight search” moment. You can select a Departure airport, and select Anywhere in the To: field. You can put in a custom date range, which will let you search a week, month, or really any range of dates. You can also select Anytime to find the cheapest flight on any date. You can search return or one way flights. This is helpful to find cheap flights to anywhere from your city.

The airfares it give generally seem to be accurate, though you’ll almost always find more accurate rates on Google Flights or the airline directly.

What we don’t like: We found the speed of the map display to vary a lot.Some days results appeared to be lightning fast, and some days they were frustratingly slow, despite our Internet speed being consistently fast.

Our take: Not bad. Not quite good enough to move away from Skyscanner or Google Flights.

FareCompare – A Kayak Explore alternative

Like Kayak Explore, FareCompare lets you search for fares to anywhere from a specific departure city.

The problem is that we found FareCompare to be slower, and have less features, than Kayak Explore or Skyscanner.

What we don’t like: We find the FareCompare search to be slow, and don’t love that you can only search from specific cities, as it won’t let you search to, or from, specific countries or regions. Once you select the airfare that interests you, finding that flight can be awkward as it opens a half dozen windows to other popular sites like Expedia.

Our take: Too limited and just another front end to more popular search sites.

Momondo

Momondo has long been a favorite of travel hackers and bloggers, since it seems to be able to search more budget airlines.

They now have an Anywhere search, but you need to enter a departure date. You can see results in a list, but there aren’t a lot of filters or options. It’s fine, but there’s no reason to choose it over Skyscanner or Google flights.

What we don’t like: The big drawback is that you must give a departure date, meaning you can’t search for the cheapest fare for an entire month or year.

Whichbudget

Whichbudget lets you search for cheap random flights from a city or country to anywhere for the cheapest airfare. It’s fast, and it also lets you search from a good range of international destinations, and was the only search engine that would let us specify Anywhere in the departure field, which is helpful if your departure city or country is flexible, but you know your destination.

What we don’t like: Unfortunately, the results are clunky, the text is hard to read, and you can’t sort the results to show the lowest price first. We didn’t find it user friendly at all.

Our take: It’s ugly too look at, with poor sorting of results, small text and worse than average results. Not our favorite way to search flights by date not destination, or well, any other way.

Airfarewatchdog

Airfarewatchdog is probably the most bare bones of all the search engines that let you find a flight to any destination. It will only let you search from a specific airport (not even a city, but a specific airport), and doesn’t offer many useful filters.

What we don’t like: Limited functionality, and it’s annoying in that it keeps asking for your name and email to sign up and get low price alerts.

Our take: Not bad for basic searches where you have a destination, but not good for finding a flight if you don’t know your final destination. Might be good for email alerts if you want to go to specific place and are just waiting for a good deal.

Mobissimo’s Activity Search

Search from New York to anywhere on Mobissimo

The Mobissimo Activity Search lets you search for fares from a departure city to anywhere, based on the activities you choose. And no, it won’t let you search to, or from, entire countries.

Unfortunately, the Mobissimo Activity Search just brings up a long list of places. You need to click on each location individually to bring up prices.

Our take: Fail. Unless you have countless hours to waste clicking through each link or just want some ideas of possible locations to check out don’t even bother. Not a good no destination flight search engine.

Drungli

Back in the day, the Drungli website used to have a Drungli take me wherever search. Sadly, it’s not working anymore, so it just acts like a normal search engine.

To sum it up

Skyscanner and Kayak Explore, as well as Google Flights Map search, are helpful for getting a general idea of flight costs to different places around the world. If you’re coming up dry with those three, and have a bit of time, then check out the others for cheap flights to any destination.

However, once you’ve used any of them to pick out affordable destinations (and dates), it’s worth it to compare those flights to some of the budget airlines that don’t appear in a lot of search engines. You also need to compare hidden airline surcharges like baggage fees and specialty taxes.

Different airlines charge baggage and seating fees differently and a lot of these search tools don’t always factor those costs in.

46 Responses

Excellent article. As frugal travelers, we always search for the best price. Even thought some of your above mentioned websites may be better or more versatile than others, to get the best price you always end up checking them all anyhow. Of course versatility in both destination and date will allow you to take advantage of the best deals.

Sometimes it’s also worthwhile to take a train or bus to a different airport to take advantage of the best deals. Worthwhile searching airports within say 100 kms of both your departure and arrival to see if a better deal exists.

Great article guys. Skyscanner is my go to but I also find fly.com and momondo.com to occasionally pull out fares that are slightly cheaper. Momondo has a month view similar to Skyscanner which is really useful when you’re flexible with dates. Usually I have all 3 open to make sure I get the cheapest fares. Probably worth mentioning that sites like lastminute.com, travelocity and the like seem to NEVER have the cheapest fares.

I didn’t know you could do that! I’ve been using skyscanner for years and didn’t know about the anywhere option. I’ll have to try this summer!

I do have to admit though, skyscanner used to be better before. I remember the time when I could look at the entire month and see the specific prices for EVERY day of the month.

Nowadays, when I select a whole month to a specific destination, all I get are like 3 or 4 days with prices, while the rest are blank. They say that to see the price, you have to click on a specific date. Crappy! Used to be better…

Great article. I appreciate the work that went into ranking the different online options.

One thing I would also add would be that sites like Flyertalk have forums where various “Mileage Run” deals are discussed to gain the most miles for the least $, and if your locale happens to fit, it also means a great fare deal.

A lot more reading and research goes into using a site like that, but the forums are chalk full of useful information once you sort through it (though you need time to do so!)

Good tips. Thank you for sharing these resources. Comparison websites are a great place to start if you want to get a good travel deal whether it is flights or accommodation. If you are already travelling then the local low cost airlines are a good place to get cheap flights. If you are travelling in Africa I wrote a post on my personal travel blog about low cost airlines in Africa which I hope you find useful.http://www.dontworryjusttravel.com/africa/low-cost-airlines-africa-top-5

Ha! niceeee. a friend sent me a link to your article because it’s so similar (in his eyes) to my cheap flights guide. Good job there, only thing – you forgot ITA Matrix. It’s a free tool by Google that seriously kicks all the other flight engines in the butt. I do love the Everywhere feature of Skyscanner – it’s a real time saver.

Hey Regev. We’ve been huge fans of ITA Matrix for years and used it well before it was bought out by Google in 2010. The reason it’s not included in this post was that this only lists search engines that would let you fly “anywhere”. ITA Matrix lets you select locations up to 2000 miles from any destination city however that’s only a fraction of the globe at a time.

It is an awesome tool if you have a general idea of where you want to fly to however. Not sure you noticed but it is mentioned at the bottom of the post if only briefly. It’s also featured right at the beginning of our Six Quick Steps to Nailing the Cheapest Flight post.

Your latest post on the subject is helpful as well. Travelers looking for a deal need every tool they can find to lower their cost and stretch their dollar. Thanks for reminding everyone how great ITA Matrix is!

Great post!! In my personal experience that Kayak Explore is one of the best searching tool for affordable flights to anywhere. The Main thing about it that its refundable. I will recommend it to people who want to book a cheap flights.

I use Skyscanner almost exclusively. I’ve never heard of the ITA Matrix, just checked it out and it seemed OK but kind of limiting. Skyscanner still seems to produce cheaper flights. I’ll keep it on my list though, always great to have another tool handy. Learn something new every day!

I’ve been using skyscanner and liked it a lot,the only problem is the other company it led me to: OPODO ( it was a flight in Europe, France-Norway-France).it appeared very cheap,but the OPODO itself fooled me like a baby and took money from my card twice.it has been already 3 months and they don’t want to give me back my money although I have all the evidence.so I don’t even know what measures should I take-maybe go to the police,because calling,e-mailing and sending letters doesn’t help.

So I just wanted to warn people if somebody happens to fly in Europe, you better be careful by avoiding using OPODO.

And it ould be nice if somebody could post an article about some other not-so-reliable companies

This is what I need. Cheap flights are just what me and my husband are looking for since we are now travelling with our kids, we better have to find ways on how to cut the budget short to enjoy more along the trip from flights to food and hotels. Thanks for sharing this. It’s amazing!

Do be careful, as some budget airlines will charge a fee for any changes. Flag carrying airlines like British Airways often release cheap flights months in advance, with cheap international flights becoming available five and a half months before departure. If you’ve always dreamed of flying to New York, Thailand, or Australia, then don’t wait until the last minute to book the trip of a lifetime.

Thanks! Great article. I have a situation – I entered NY – Anywhere and decided to go to Germany because the fares are low. Now I’m open to returning from any nearby country to NY. How can I do the reverse, Anywhere – NY?

If you select nearby airports and type in Germany it will give you a list of nearby airports. You would then have to try out a few nearby countries to see what they bring back. I don’t think there are many people who would use it as you hoped to but as an avid traveler I would so use that feature! Especially from Europe where all the countries are so close to each other. Good luck!

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